CHAPTER 4
Cross-Cultural Understanding
Hearing something new is embarrassing and difficult for the ear; foreign music we do not hear well.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil
In Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce, Stanley Weintraub recounts the tale of combatants on both sides of the front line putting aside their weapons and celebrating Christmas together in December 1914.1 A striking feature of the spontaneous gestures of goodwill at many points along the front line was how often they were facilitated by song. “It was with shared traditions and song that the two sides approached one another,” Weintraub observes.
Yuletide carols initiated a tentative courtship that further developed through physical contact and ultimately the sharing of the soldiers’ most valued commodities—food and tobacco and such souvenirs as uniform buttons and insignia. . . . Everywhere, Christmas ritual—especially song—eased the anxiety and fear of initial contact.2
At times song was used to transform the struggle with the enemy into something more like sport. One Seaforth Highlanders regiment officer wrote home about a challenge from the Germans to sing and of the irreverent renditions of “Who Were You with Last Night?” and “Tipperary” his side sang in response. He goes on to register his surprise when “the enemy played ‘Home Sweet Home,’ and ‘God Save the King,’ at 2:30 A.M.!’” Weintraub also reports Lieutenant Sir Edward Hulse’s claim in a letter to his mother that “his 2nd Scots Guards ‘assaulted’ the Germans with carols.” Hulse remarked, “we are going to give the enemy every conceivable song in harmony from carols to Tipperary. . . . Our object will be to [shout] down the now too-familiar strains of Deutschland über alles and the Wacht am Rhein we hear from their trenches every evening.”3
Certainly this episode indicates that the same music can be appreciated— even be a source of inspiration—across national boundaries. But it hardly demonstrates that the same music is intelligible across the boundaries of musical cultures. As far as “Silent Night” is concerned, German, French, English, and American societies are all the same musical culture. Are there grounds for believing that music penetrates hearts and minds across musical traditions?
We have already seen that a number of features of musical perception appear to be characteristic of the species. Thus we can expect them to impact the way music is organized, even though they are insufficient to dictate musical structure in detail. Directly, we will look at some “structural universals” of music—characteristics that typify the way people organize music in all or most cultures. These are “universals” in a weaker sense than the processing universals described in the previous chapter; they are widespread patterns, but they do not necessarily apply to all human music. Still, they can also often facilitate comprehension of much foreign music in that they indicate patterns that should be familiar to members of most musical cultures.
Nevertheless, as I argue in the previous chapter, certain factors stand in the way of the listener who seeks to understand alien music. In the latter part of this chapter, we will consider some of these, beginning with the fact that some of a culture’s grounds for evaluating music are not always superficially obvious. After discussing some of the obstacles to cross-cultural musical understanding, I will conclude this chapter with some preliminary considerations of how these obstacles might be overcome.
STRUCTURAL UNIVERSALS
Musical cultures seem to converge in some of their choices about how to structure pieces of music. Lerdahl and Jackendoff propose a direct relationship between the processing universals described in the previous chapters and the sorts of musical structures societies construct:
Musical idioms will tend to develop along lines that enable listeners to make use of their abilities to organize musical signals. Therefore, if there is some kind of organization that is especially “natural” (that is, favored by musical cognitive capacity), we should expect this sort of organization to be widespread among musical idioms.
They add the important qualification, “On the other hand, we do not expect all idioms to exploit all aspects of musical cognition equally.”4
As we noted in the last chapter, Meyer mentions one cross-cultural regularity—considerable redundancy and usually hierarchical organization. Ethnomusicologists, psychologists, and philosophers have indicated other “universals” of this sort:
1. Music is made in “pieces” or “utterances.” Bruno Nettl observes, “One does not simply ‘sing,’ but one sings something. Music is composed of artifacts, although cultures differ greatly in their views of what constitutes such an artifact.”5 Stephen Davies observes, “I do not know of any culture lacking musical works for performance—that is repeatable pieces with titles or identifying descriptions.”6
2. Melodies in all cultures tend to be constructed on the basis of fairly small successive intervals. The chief melodic intervals in melodic progressions tend to be in the range of the major second (though the exact interval depends on the tuning system); it is “usually no greater than 3–4 semitones,” according to Harwood.7 Meyer claims that “intervals smaller than a half step almost always serve to inflect structural tones” because of the limitations of human perception. Although microtonal scales are theoretically possible, Meyer observes, “to the best of my knowledge, no scales of this sort have ever become shared cultural constraints.”8
3. Most musical cultures employ a centering tone (a tonic) or some kind of tendency.9 Cultures usually devise music in such a way that the listener has a clear conception of the ultimate destination of a piece.10 Drones and frequent recurrence of a pitch are among the means by which such a reference pitch is established.11
4. Musical utterances tend to descend in pitch at the end.12 David Huron terms the tendency of melodies to move downward via small intervals “step declination.”13
5. Internal repetition is typical within musical utterances.14
6. Use of loud, fast, accelerating patterns in high registers appears to be a “universal” device expressing emotional excitement.15 (In general, some prosodic cues for emotional expression seem to be constant across speech and language and to hold cross-culturally. We will consider universal cues for emotional expression in later chapters.)
7. Rhythmic structures depend on tones with varying lengths and varying dynamic emphases.16 In particular, pulse or meter makes the rhythmic pattern asymmetrical, creating an impression of location within the beat.17
8. One might include the nearly universal tendency to construct rhythms on the basis of patterns of twos and threes.18 John Chernoff points out that this tendency is at work even within rhythmically complex African music. “In spite of what we think, most African music is in some common variety of duple or triple time (like 4/4 or 12/8) and not in the 7/4 or 5/4 that many Westerners have thought they might have heard. Music in 7/4 time would be very difficult to dance to.”19
9. Emphasis on the interval of the fifth is a near-universal.20
Some of these structural universals further contribute to music’s capacity to reflect our activity, which we considered in the previous chapter. The very fact that music tends to be formulated in pieces enables one to have a sense of completion, usually combined with a sense of at least relative relaxation. Relaxation is also conveyed by the decline in pitch at the end of a piece. Melodies tend to be constructed in small steps, and this reinforces awareness of the precise tones available in the scale across a particular span of pitch space. Going to the adjacent scale tone or the next is the most typical melodic movement; thus we become particularly aware of where the specific steps of the scale are. The device of a centering tone facilitates the impression of a sense of direction in music, as well as the sense of relative relaxation when this pitch occurs. Rhythmic structure, which indicates regularity in the passage of time, depends on the uneven durations of tones, which we considered previously.
Musical structure is also ubiquitously affected by the human psychological tendency to habituate to any persistent stimulus.21 A repeated pattern, for example, recedes into the attentional background. Perhaps this explains the “law of three” observed by many composers in the West.22 The law of three states that an exact repetition or sequence should be repeated no more than three times if one is to maintain the attention of the audience. The reason for this may be that a third appearance of a pattern is noteworthy; one recognizes that a stable trend is in place. On the fourth statement, however, the mind only confirms its judgment that a regularity has been introduced. Having recognized the presence of a reiterated pattern, one’s attention is no longer required to make sense of that part of the musical signal. The tihai phenomenon in Hindustani music involves an exact reiteration of a pattern so that it is stated three times consecutively, with the effect of a relative climax. The repetition gives the tihai pattern particular emphasis. Perhaps this is another reflection of the optimality in cases of repetition of three consecutive statements of a pattern.
Scholars differ with respect to whether universals are evident in any larger formal structures in music. Harwood is dubious.23 Nettl, however, contends that there is a near-universal “simplest style.” It “consists of songs that have a short phrase repeated several or many times, with minor variations, using three or four pitches within a range of a fifth.”24 This type of music, which Nettl thinks is archaic, is frequently used in ritual and remains the primary kind of music in some societies. Mâche proposes another ubiquitous style, “pentatonic polyphony on a drone,” which he takes to be so widespread that it might be classed as a universal.25
UNIVERSALS OF EVALUATION
Transcultural and Pancultural Universals
Perceptual and structural universals do not exhaust the range of possible musical universals. Analyzing the universal dimensions of aesthetic experience, Wilfried van Damme suggests that there may be evaluative universals. He distinguishes between what he calls “transcultural universals” and “pancultural universals.” Transcultural universals are “stimulus properties which as such would seem to appeal to all human beings, regardless of cultural background.” Pancultural universals, by contrast, are evaluative criteria, “principles that are found to be operative in evaluating stimuli in all (pan) cultures,” whether or not the stimuli themselves are similar.26
Van Damme submits that what most people consider to be “real universals” are those of the transcultural sort. He cites several candidates for transcultural universals in visual aesthetic appreciation, which are apparent in many cultures and for which counterexamples are virtually nonexistent. These include symmetry and balance, clarity, smoothness, brightness, and novelty. However, he also observes that divergent aesthetic values may actually reflect the same underlying principle (a pancultural universal if the principle holds across cultures). The diverse cultural standards of ideal human body weight, for example, may all reflect a high evaluation of “health and material well-being.” Van Damme concludes from this that although there may not be transcultural agreement in evaluating a particular person’s physical weight, there is pancultural agreement that a person’s weight should correlate with health and physical well-being. He proposes that there is such a pancultural universal: the regularity that “people in a particular culture find attractive those visual stimuli which in terms of that culture aptly signify its sociocultural ideals.”27 He defines sociocultural values or ideals as “those qualities which, in a given culture or society, are more or less communally conceived to be worth striving for individually and collectively, and which as such are explicitly or implicitly held up as guidelines or objectives.”28 The same societal ideal may be expressed in diverse images.
Applying Van Damme’s distinction to music, we might expect some universal standards for positive evaluation, even if musical cultures apply them to works that differ markedly. Among the transcultural universals for visual appearance that Van Damme lists, symmetry, balance, and clarity, at least, would seem potentially applicable to music as well. Novelty might apply, too, although considering the seemingly universal tendency to value repetition in music (presumably another transcultural universal), novelty is apparently considered desirable only to a limited degree.
Diversity among Cultural Ideals
Despite some similarities, various cultures nevertheless seem to have different ideals for evaluating the stimulus properties of music. We find a musical illustration of such differences in the evaluative standards of Javanese and Balinese musical culture. As William Malm describes the difference, “the generally sedate quality of Javanese music is completely shattered by the boisterous brilliance of the Balinese sound.”29 Although the instruments used in the two musical cultures are fairly similar, Balinese gamelan performers create a “shimmering” effect by precisely tuning groups of instruments at approximately 7 hertz apart, with the effect that when instruments from both groups play the same note, they produce approximately seven beats per second.30 The Javanese aim at an even, balanced sound that has been compared to a river flowing over a pebbled bottom. Balinese musicians, by contrast, aim at fiery, brilliant effects and dramatic contrast. Their music is jagged, dramatic, irregular, and unbalanced. Balinese singers sometimes practice on rocky beaches in order to create the desired vocal quality.31
Cultural differences with respect to ideals for vocal music can have perceptual repercussions. Robert Walker points out the contrast between the sound qualities valued by the Western tradition and by some Native American societies. Western singers are “trained to produce high levels of spectral energy” so as to produce a ringing tone, while Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest concentrate energy at a lower energy level.32 Walker considers each of these ideals for vocal sound contextually appropriate. The Western approach, which results in a wide range of harmonics, is suitable to public performance, in which the aim is to hear the singer above accompanying instruments. The vocal ideal of the Kwakiutl tribe, by contrast, is appropriate for their “intimate, personal, and intensely spiritual music,” which “serves personal totemistic needs rather than public performance functions.” Walker observes that the environment also encourages this ideal, for the music is usually sung outdoors, and in the rainforest in which the Kwakiutl live, higher frequencies fade quickly.33
Within the West, different ideals for vocal music have been upheld at different periods in history. A treatise from the early thirteenth century alleging to represent the views of “the ancient Holy Fathers” claimed that by upholding its precepts for singing “the offering of our praises becomes pleasant and agreeable unto God”; among these were the precepts to sing naturally, with a clear, full, and steady voice.34 By contrast, controlled vibrato and emphasis on individual timbre were admired and commonplace in nineteenth- and twentieth-century vocal performance.
Music’s Reflection of Social Ideals
Alan Lomax suggests that cultural differences in preferred vocal style reflect different conceptions of how individuals should interact. He contrasts American Indian and European vocal styles, which he correlates with their different respective emphases on collective cooperative activity and individualistic assertion. American Indian vocal style is “strikingly muscular in character,” according to Lomax, typically “throaty, husky, sometimes grating, rich in nasal overtones, and produced at the normal speaking pitch” with occasional high-pitched yelps, although the Plains Indian style tends to maintain a highpitched tone throughout. Although used for ritual, healing, mnemonics, and shamanistic trance, the majority of Native American music is employed with dance, and for this reason is emphatically rhythmic and regular. The European area from which colonizers came tends toward a “high-pitched, often harsh and strident” vocal quality, “delivered from a tight throat with great vocal tension,” and “suitable for the presentation of long and highly decorated melodic line.” Lomax summarizes: “Control and individualism are the key descriptive terms here. Cooperative music-making is achieved only by groups of adepts,” that is, by experts, usually professional musicians.35
Lomax’s theory that a society’s song style is correlated with social factors supports the notion that music reflects sociocultural ideals. He contends, “musical styles may be symbols of basic human value systems which function at the unconscious level and evolve with glacial slowness because the basic social patterns which produce them also evolve slowly.” Lomax developed a technique that he terms “cantometrics,” a coding of generic style features characteristic of the music of particular societies.36 Cantometrics considers both “the phenomena described by European music notation—melody, rhythm, harmony interval size, etc.,” and other factors, such as the size, social structure, leadership roles, integration of the music-making group, the kinds of embellishments employed, and the vocal tone quality typically adopted.37
One of Lomax’s most striking proposals is that musical style is correlated with sexual mores regarding the behavior of women, with a more relaxed vocal style corresponding to greater permissiveness and a higher status of women. In an article in which he considers the typical song style in various cultures, focusing in detail on the regions of Spain and Italy, he concludes:
In those societies considered, the sexual code, the position of women, and the treatment of children seem to be the social patterns most clearly linked with musical style. Where women are made into chattels, as they have been during recent history in most areas of high culture, their feelings of melancholy and frustration have determined that the entire music of the various societies take on a nostalgic or agonized character, in singing style, melodic type, and emotional content. The women in these societies fix the early musical preferences of the young, so that when these children become adults they experience a pleasurable recall of childhood emotions associated with their mothers and their mothers’ sad songs; thus a sorrowful music fills them with a feeling of security and they find it beautiful and pleasurable.38
Lomax’s account of the origins of the tense, vocally constricted, plaintive style is obviously speculative. One might alternatively suppose that general attitudes toward the body correlate with the extent of a culture’s insistence on bodily control and with its level of sexual repression.
Perhaps less contentiously, Lomax considers the presence or absence of a dominating leader in a musical style to reflect a society’s ideals for social organization, hierarchical or otherwise. He describes Western Europe folk song as being mainly organized with a leader dominating a passive audience (noting the similar pattern of symphony orchestras, where the conductor gets extreme compliance from the orchestra as well as the audience). This pattern is essentially the normative ideal for interaction in the same region.39
Music, according to Lomax, is a symbol of a society’s general orientation toward the world. Referring to the Pygmy and Bushmen of Africa, whose way of life is similar in most particulars, Lomax reports that their musical style symbolizes their idyllically cooperative and tolerant lifestyle.
This extraordinary degree of vocal relaxation, which occurs rarely in the world as an over-all vocal style, seems to be a psycho-physiological set, which symbolizes openness, nonrepressiveness, and an unconstricted approach to the communication of emotion. . . . The vocal empathy of the Pygmies seems to be matched by the cooperative style of their culture. . . . Even their melodies are shared pleasures, just as are all tasks, all property, and all social responsibilities. The only parallel in our coding system is found at the peak of Western European contrapuntal writing, where again all the separate interests of a variegated musical community are subordinated to a desire to sing together with a united voice about universal human values.40
Lomax’s cantometric theory has generated considerable critical response. As Steven Feld summarizes the lines of criticism:
Sample size and time depth, compatibility of song data with social structural data, psychocultural reductionism, inferential history, reading correlation as causation, intracultural and areal variability, and the extent to which the coding system normalized raters in ways which constrain the accuracy of pattern judgment were all causes of critical discussion surrounding this monumental work.41
Feld emphasizes the further problem of limiting the base for constructing a cultural profile to ten songs.42 Lomax justifies this strategy on the ground that song styles in a culture are highly redundant, but one consequence may be the exaggeration of cultural homogeneity. More methodologically, his cantometric method has been criticized for using the same test, the chi-square test, on the same data over and over in generating his various correlations, making it more likely that the statistically improbable will appear to be a serious probability.43
Even his critics, however, acknowledge that Lomax is on to something important in correlating musical style with cultural norms for interpersonal behavior. Edwin Erickson, who reanalyzed Lomax’s data using a cluster approach, did not find many of the clusters of societal arrangements to be correlated consistently with musical variables. However, he did find cross-cultural correlations between a constricted vocal style and sexual repressiveness, between polyphonic singing and gender equality, and between interlocking counterpoint and small-scale gathering societies. He also found correlations between societal complexity and the number of musical instruments typically employed.44 Feld acknowledges the aptness of seeing musical structure as a model of social structure, even while denying a one-to-one structural isomorphism: “For any given society, everything that is socially salient will not necessarily be musically marked. But for all societies, anything that is musically salient will undoubtedly be socially marked, albeit in a great variety of ways, some more superfluous than others.”45
Two important corollaries emerge from the idea that music reflects cultural ideals. One is that the reflection of cultural ideals may enhance both the enjoyment and the meaning that musical participants (both performers and listeners) find in music. Van Damme suggests that visual images may be especially gratifying when they consolidate sociocultural ideals into a form that is particularly dense with meaning for the beholder.
The gratification or pleasure involved may be seen to derive from the fact that visual metaphors of sociocultural ideals are able to elicit a condensed manifold of meaning that the enculturated mind of the perceiver has come to favourably assess. The intensified welcoming of such a range of positively evaluated meaning, cogently signified by a visual stimulus, may then be regarded as particularly gratifying.46
I submit that the musical “image,” too, can offer gratification on similar grounds, and that this helps account for both its emotional power and the complications involved in appreciating music from another culture.
For example, consider the presentation of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (op. 125). Halting statements of what will become the basic melody of the ode in several lower instrumental voices prepare one for the initial outburst of the human voice. After the voice states the first verse of the ode, other voices join in, deriving their musical material from the song’s melody. Schopenhauer (apparently taking the structure of his society’s music for granted) proposed that the vocal registers conjoined in music are analogous to the great chain of being from inorganic nature to the human being; these analogies strike me as fairly persuasive in the context of this movement. I find it easy to imagine that Schopenhauer built his analogies with this movement in mind, when he describes the various voices as different levels manifesting the will, the fundamental reality in his metaphysical view:
Those nearer to the bass are . . . the still inorganic bodies manifesting themselves, however, in many ways. Those that are higher represent to me the plant and animal worlds. . . . But all these bass-notes and ripienos that constitute the harmony, lack that sequence and continuity of progress which belong only to the upper voice that sings the melody. . . . Finally, in the melody, in the high, singing, principle voice, leading the whole and progressing with unrestrained freedom, in the uninterrupted significant connexion of one thought from beginning to end, and expressing a whole, I recognize the highest grade of the will’s objectification, the intellectual life and endeavour of man. . . . Melody . . . relates the most secret history of the intellectually enlightened will, portrays every agitation, every effort, every movement of the will.47
Even if one is not convinced by Schopenhauer’s account, the impression that the whole panoply of nature gradually erupts into the joy that is explicitly described in the ode amplifies the emotional content of Schiller’s poem and the gratification of participating in it, whether as performer or listener. Moreover, this ideal of coordinated, harmonious interplay of every vital entity is an image of the ethical ideal of highly structured industrialized societies. Very likely the impact of the enthusiastic conviviality and cooperation embodied in the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth figured prominently in the European Union’s selection of the music for the “Ode to Joy” as its anthem.48
We are also in a position to recognize a second corollary to the fact that music reflects cultural ideals. The difference between surface characteristics of musical style and the underlying preferences that give rise to them suggests a rather surprising fact about musical universals. Insofar as musical universals include preferences that can manifest in a variety of ways, the universal character of music promotes diversity, not conformity. The range of musical universals (perceptual, structural, and evaluative) underdetermines particular musical structures. The universals are, accordingly, compatible with enormous musical variety. The widely diverging styles we hear in the music of the world, then, are exactly what we might predict.49 A consequence of musical preference universals, then, is the vast variety of music.
The picture is complicated still further by the fact that in today’s world, in which few musical cultures are homogenous, we would be hard pressed to categorize many cultures as having a single set of evaluative ideals for music. These days few societies, if any, are musically homogenous or immersed exclusively in the traditional music of their ancestors. The widespread availability of recording and playback technology has acquainted much of the world with Western music. Visiting New Caledonia some time back, I saw a local group on television performing John Lennon’s song, “Imagine,” and recognized that the song might be in the repertoire of local groups everywhere. The era of “world music” is not without imperialistic tendencies, particularly among those who steer the music business, and well-situated Western musicians no doubt exert more musical influence on musicians in the developing world than the other way around. “Imagine” is played everywhere, but traditional New Caledonian songs are not. The nonreciprocity in these encounters of cultures gives us reason to be concerned about the preservation of traditional musical cultures.50 In relation to evaluative principles, the current situation of musical exchange raises new questions about the grounds for universal convergence where it exists. It would be worthwhile to try to determine the degree to which evaluative principles applied to music are being transformed by these encounters, and, conversely, how much the application of different cultures’ evaluative standards is affecting the performance of transplanted music.51
The popularity of rock music throughout the world suggests the possibility that evaluative standards are changing or broadening in some places, but it is hard to tell which of several possible descriptions is more accurate. Some of these possibilities are:
1. Rock music is sufficiently malleable (or has few enough intrinsic characteristics) to be adapted to suit a variety of cultural evaluative preferences. (The development of the rock opera, for example, might be seen as such an adaptation. The Who’s Tommy, while expressing “traditional” rock values such as musical energy and strong backbeat, nevertheless incorporates tendencies that are valued in other musical styles, such as complex vocal harmonies and elaborate instrumentals. In connection with cultural interaction, the question to the point for our purposes here is whether at least some of the same evaluative standards applied to traditional music are also satisfied by rock.)
2. Rock music is promoting new musical values in communities where they didn’t exist before, often supplanting previous values. (This was one of the complaints of opponents of early rock ‘n’ roll. This is also the concern of those who worry about the fate of other musical forms and traditions that appear to have declining audiences.52)
3. Rock music reflects pancultural values that are also expressed in traditional forms of music (such as the value placed on music that encourages physical entrainment and participation).
4. Rock music widens the range of musical values that are appreciated within given societies, but does not (or need not) supplant those that were already present. (In other words, audiences are capable of appreciating various kinds of music and applying differential values appropriate to these various types.)
5. All of the above.
Thomas Turino offers reasons to think that musical imports might extend the scope of musical appreciation without supplanting previous musical values. He also draws attention to certain values of long standing that apply to participatory music across many traditions, though they are not necessarily evident in all types of music in the respective cultures. Such values, he suggests, speak to general psychological needs and can be satisfied by music to which one is a relative newcomer.
Turino contends that criteria for evaluating music can and do vary within societies, depending on what type of music is being evaluated. Evaluative criteria differ depending on which of four subcategories, or “fields,” an instance of music belongs to: presentational music, participatory music, “high fidelity music” (which aims at accuracy in representing a live performance), and “studio audio art” (which aims to create a new sonic product that does not correspond to an actual live performance). Each of these subcategories has its own profile of preferences for certain kinds of sound qualities. Participatory music, which aims at the inclusion of as many as possible, is successful when it achieves a “wall of sound” and “densely overlapping textures, wide tunings, consistently loud volume and buzzy timbres.” These ideals typify participatory music across cultures, according to Turino.53 By contrast, studio audio art is liberated from the aspiration of involving people in performing together in real time and is valued more highly in accordance with the control and precision it exhibits in shaping the sonic object.54
While relativizing evaluative criteria to the subcategory of music involved in a particular case, Turino stresses the ubiquitous tendency of people to engage in participatory music-making. Different societies and smaller cohorts of individuals vary in how they value the four fields (that is, subcategories) of music. For example, presentational music (music performed for an audience that does not participate) is the predominant field in the contemporary United States. Nevertheless—and this is one of Turino’s major points—participatory music-making is widespread throughout the world because it serves the human need for deep connection with other people.55 The values endemic to participatory music—good social interaction, provisions to make newcomers comfortable and easily able to participate (such as a high degree of repetition, dense textures that cloak individuals contributions, formal predictability, redundant rhythm, room for a variety of levels of skill and experience (with both “an ever expanding ceiling of challenges” to keep the interest of the experienced as well as simple roles that novices can play), and deliberate efforts not to exclude others—are conducive to social bonding in a powerful way, and Turino argues that they are exhibited in this type of music throughout the world.56 In that he believes that participatory music is valued in all societies to some extent, these values seem to be transcultural in one sense. At the same time, they are not appropriate to other subcategories of music that exist within the same society, such as presentational performance or studio audio art.
The upshot of our consideration of evaluative universals is that while some cross-cultural standards for evaluation do seem to exist, they do not exhaust the grounds on which instances of music are assessed within their cultures of origin. Part of the challenge of learning any form of seriously foreign music includes the discovery of what standards of evaluation are appropriate in the cultural context, and not all of these are cross-culturally evident. Nevertheless, the apparent existence of evaluative universals give us reason to think that at least some familiar values will be relevant for coming to understand what a culture esteems in its music.
CROSS-CULTURAL INTELLIGIBILITY
Impediments
The diversity of ways in which cultures shape their musical styles can be impediments to cross-cultural musical understanding. This need not be an absolute obstacle, however, even if we inevitably do bring our encultured expectations to bear on foreign music. Nicholas Cook rightly suggests that although we will need considerable exposure to another culture’s music to really understand it, we can enjoy it on some level in the meantime.57
Davies points out that one kind of enjoyment of foreign music is not, strictly speaking, musical enjoyment.
A person who listens to Balinese Gendèr Wayang, neither knowing nor caring why the sounds follow each other in the order they do, is someone who interests herself not in the music, but in the noise it makes. . . . If she is unable to anticipate what might or should be played next, feels no sense of closure on the completion of a piece, is incapable of identifying recurrence of material or of recognizing similarities and differences between parts of a work or between different works, then she does not appreciate the music qua music, though the music causes her enjoyment. This remains true in the case in which, rather than being indifferent to its organization, she radically misperceives the principles governing its generation. This is the position of an Occidental who listens to these Balinese pieces in terms of the musical conventions with which she is most familiar, those of tonal, Western music.58
Davies suggests some of the desiderata for understanding foreign music: (1) having some sense of why one musical event follows another, (2) being able to anticipate what musical event might follow, (3) having a sense of closure at the end of a piece of music, (4) recognizing material that recurs, (5) recognizing similarities and differences among the parts of the a piece, (6) recognizing similarities and differences among different works, and (7) not superimposing the presuppositions of one’s own musical background on foreign music.
But what if we are simply unable to orient ourselves in foreign music? What obstacles stand in our way? A number of factors may be at work. One of these is discomfort in response to an unfamiliar timbre, the use of idiophones,59 or even vocal techniques not employed in the music of one’s own culture. When I first heard the sound of a didgeridoo, I did not immediately recognize that the sound came from a musical instrument. I thought that it might be computerized sound used to create an evocative soundscape for the movie I was watching. I was rather fascinated in this case, but I can imagine being disconcerted. The growling buzzyness characteristic of chants by Tibetan monks or the music played on the mbira (the African thumb piano) also differ markedly from timbres and vocal ideals in Western music, and it might sound disturbingly alien to someone who is only familiar with Western music.60 While this basis for discomfort is superficial, it may still be a real impediment to attentive appreciation.
Two other interference factors derive directly from the nature of musical perception. We might find either the tuning system or the basic way of organizing the structure of the music too far removed from our instilled expectations. As we have noted, psychologists of music point out that memory for musical features involves schemas developed over time.61 These include general knowledge of scales and allowable intervals, for example, and of how music behaves, as well as more specific knowledge, established while listening, of how the particular piece of music is behaving. While one is listening to music, therefore, one taps both long-term and short-term memory.
To claim that we have acquired schemata for scales implies that we are geared to the type of tuning our society uses. Being accustomed to the scales of one’s own musical culture can seriously interfere with enjoying or even processing the intervals in another culture’s music. Marc Perlman and Carol Krumhansl experimentally confirmed that many musicians among their subjects, from both Java and the West, assimilated intervals to “a set of interval standards,” although some of the musicians from both cultures were able to identify the interval size of unfamiliar intervals with considerable accuracy.”62 Michael Lynch and Rebecca Eilers similarly indicate that culturally ingrained schemata can pose a problem for those who listen to unfamiliar foreign music.
When a Western adult . . . listens to melodies based on non-Western scales . . . the intervals of the melodies will not necessarily match those of a culturally familiar schema, and this mismatch may cause the listener difficulty in processing and determining the interval structure of the melodies.63
Lynch and Eilers’s experimental research suggests that children between the ages of ten and thirteen, whether or not they have been musically trained, already have sufficient acculturation with respect to the musical scales of their own culture that they are unable to identify mistuning in a nonnative scale. Western adult musicians were better able to identify mistunings in non-Western scales than the children, but they did less well than they did in identifying mistunings in Western scales.64 David Huron claims that listeners “commonly . . . will form a broad category of ‘otherness’ into which all deviant stimuli are, by default, indiscriminately assigned.”65 Possibly the inability of the children studied to discriminate mistunings in nonnative scales stems from employment of this generalized category.
As an example of a case in which internalized schemata are misleading, consider the tala (or tempo) tintal in North Indian classical music. Tintal employs a cycle of sixteen beats. Westerners, who are accustomed to music in 4/4 time, tend to find this tala relatively accessible (by comparison, say, with ektal, which employs a cycle of twelve beats, or dhamar, which employs a cycle of fourteen beats); but they also tend to hear tintal as 4/4 time.66 To hear tintal this way is to misunderstand the rhythmic cycle, which involves relative stress (referred to as tali, meaning “clap”) on beats 1, 5, and 13, anti-stress (referred to as khali, meaning “empty”) on beat 9, and a powerful gravitational impulse toward beat 1 (referred to as the sam, the most important beat structurally).67 A Westerner hearing tintal as 4/4 time would think of the 9th beat as stressed, while in tintal it is the least stressed beat in the cycle. Even if Western musical training is something of a boon for learning Indian music, in that one has learned to recognize countable meter in the first place, it can also misdirect attention if the limits of its applicability are not recognized. Huron proposes that it is “difficult to form a new schema when the new context differs only slightly from an already established schema.”68 The difficulty with tintal for Western listeners is not that it is so different from any familiar rhythm but that it is too much like one of them.
The perceptual challenge posed by alien tuning may be more disorienting than one might at first expect. The reason for this is that when we hear a tone, as we have noted earlier, we do not hear a single pitch only, but we also hear many overtones. When one does not hear the fundamental tone as being in a familiar scale, one may have difficulty determining which of the many pitches heard actually is the fundamental.69 Moreover, mismatch negativity, a brain wave response to perceived deviance, is evident even in cases in which the music is being ignored.70
The organization of musical structures elsewhere in the world may also be difficult to follow if they are unlike those with which one is familiar. Even seemingly observable patterns such as rhythm are not as immune to subjective factors as one might think. Pandora Hopkins’s 1982 study of three master musicians of other cultures (from India, Greece, and the United States, respectively) listening to Norwegian hardingfele (fiddle) music demonstrates the musicians’ use of interpretational frameworks in attempting to identify the rhythmic pattern in foreign music.
The restructuring process resulted in the trying out of new and different possibilities—mental templates. . . . It is especially significant that this restructuring process was carried out by each musician according to the path already established in his or her initial responses to the material, determined, of course, by experience.71
All of these grounds for possible confusion or disorientation in foreign music may be correlated with cultural ideals and beliefs, themselves not necessarily familiar. Music’s symbolic role in reflecting alien cultural ideals and assumptions is a fourth possible cause for difficulty in relating to foreign music, even if it is not perceptually disorienting. If music is a symbolic reflection and reinstatement of the network of roles within one’s society, a foreign listener could conceivably find the style of interaction rather alien.72
Such characteristics are not necessarily disorienting. The characteristics to which Lomax attends are evident in the surface features of songs from a given culture. One need not reorient one’s musical schemata in order to hear or recognize them. Moreover, different contexts within one’s experience might call for different modes of interaction, acquainting one with other possibilities than that which predominates in one’s cultural style of interaction. Although industrial societies tend toward hierarchical organization, this does not mean that situations the call for relatively egalitarian interaction—jury deliberation for example—are entirely lacking. Even if one might recognize that a style differs markedly from any evident in one’s own society, this does not necessarily mean that it is hard to process. Nevertheless, the particular musical “image” of optimal human interaction can be startling. This is demonstrated by Feld’s example, discussed in chapter 2, of Christian missionaries encountering Kaluli music and hearing, not a musical reflection of their favored interpersonal style, but hopeless unmusicality.
A fifth aspect of foreign music that can disturb a listener is alien ornamentation. The rapid yodel in some Hindustani vocal music might strike a Westerner as off-putting, perhaps especially if he or she cannot imagine how one could make one’s voice produce it. Foreign ornament, however, may strike a listener as more familiar than alienating. Some features of musical ornamentation, although characteristic of a particular culture, may also have widespread currency throughout the world.
Ornament style, however, even when employing basic geometric pattern, sometimes serves as a signature for a particular culture (the Swiss yodel, for example). When an ornament style is recognizably that of a particular foreign culture, it may seem especially prominent. In this case, ornament style may assist the process of familiarization with another culture’s music, even if one is becoming familiar with features that are distinctively foreign. One of the intriguing aspects of cultural ornament style is that it seems to permeate the various arts. The gesture of the Balinese dancer in which fingers are tilted back toward the wrist resembles the ornaments at the edges of many Balinese roofs and sculptures. Music, too, exhibits analogies with visual nuances of a culture’s creative output. For example, the inverted turn ornament common in Irish music (in which a tone is sequentially decorated by its upper and lower neighbor tones) might be seen as resembling the visual pattern of the Celtic line (evident, for instance, on Celtic crosses), which curves to cross itself in one direction and then the opposite.
This reinforcement of particular ornamental tendencies across various arts can serve to reinforce a template or help the uninitiated become sensitized to a new template. It thus does not necessarily provoke a sense of alienation from a foreign culture, but it can actually help one to become more comfortable in it as one gains a sense of ease in the culture more generally. Nevertheless, the greatest comfort in recognizing such parallels is reserved for those who see the culture in question as their own. E. M. Forster’s character Dr. Aziz in A Passage to India experiences a moment of soothing recognition along these lines. He steps into a mosque that he has always liked, and the narrator describes his state of mind.
A mosque by winning his approval let loose his imagination. The temple of another creed, Hindu, Christian, or Greek, would have bored him and failed to awaken his sense of beauty. Here was Islam, his own country, more than a Faith, more than a battle-cry, more, much more . . . Islam, an attitude toward life both exquisite and durable, where his body and his thoughts found their home.73
Like the mosque for Dr. Aziz, a society’s ornament styles are signs of being at home to members of the culture. Nevertheless, Forster, a non-Muslim, is imaginatively projecting himself into the mind of someone from another religious and cultural background even to develop this character.74
Orienting Oneself in Foreign Music
Thus far we have considered several aspects of foreign music that may interfere with one’s ability to easily relate to it. Among these are unfamiliar timbres, foreign tuning, exotic musical organization, alien symbolic contents, and disturbing ornamentation. To what extent can we overcome these difficulties?
One way is to develop new schemata that are appropriate for the type of unfamiliar music we encounter. Patel points out that “listeners unfamiliar with a new music are nevertheless sensitive to the statistical distributions of tones within the music, and can infer some structural relations on this basis.”75
According to David Huron, we can and do develop new schemata for music. He contends that we utilize a variety of schemata in many contexts and often learn quickly that a schema is inappropriate in context. It doesn’t take long to switch schema in such a context—this is precisely what we do when we scan radio stations, recognizing diverse styles as we hit upon various stations. Huron reports on an experiment by David Perrot and Robert Gjerdingen, which showed that listeners can often determine musical type in 250 milliseconds.76 Huron attributes the acquisition of schemata for multiple types of music to statistical learning, that is, learning the basic characteristics of a style simply by means of exposure.77 Huron suggests that failures in expectations are often the triggers that lead listeners to shift schema. They are also, he speculates, the basis for developing new schemata: “The persistent failure of expectations might well raise the alarm that a novel cognitive environment has been encountered and that the listener’s existing palette of schemata is inadequate.”78
The possibility of developing a new schema, however, depends on sufficient exposure for the type in question. If a Westerner’s exposure is too limited, the person is likely to apply a general category such as “the rest” or “the exotic” to non-Western music instead of schemata appropriate to particular non-Western styles. Even if the person is able to discriminate with a bit more sophistication, insufficient exposure will result in failure to develop new schemata for specific foreign styles.79
The most obvious solution to these problems is to become conversant with particular unfamiliar musical idioms. Becoming acquainted with a culture’s music is akin to learning a foreign language. The more one immerses oneself, the easier the process. Sometimes one will discover some features that resemble those of one’s own culture’s music. Davies mentions, for example, that
the music of Africa, south of the Sahara, is easily approached by Westerners because it so often employs the equivalent of the major scale for its tonal organization. In addition, anyone familiar with the techniques of repeated motivic variation in folk, pop, and jazz musics, as well as in some “classical” music, will not find it difficult to understand how music for the mbira or likembe is put together.80
Such fortunate coincidences facilitate the project of gaining one’s bearings, although it is important not to assume that music that is alike in some respects will be alike in all respects, as we noted above. Whether or not one is assisted by the presence of some familiar features, accounts provided by ethnomusicologists and others about how a culture’s music is structured are useful tools that can assist the novice listener in knowing what to look for. Developing familiarity with another culture’s music, however, is inevitably a gradual process.81
Prelinguistic infants are initially able to discriminate many more phonetic contrasts than they are later. As they learn a language, they appear to become desensitized to contrasts not employed in their mother tongue. Some experimental evidence suggests that infants learn to discriminate intervals in native scales more effectively than unfamiliar ones, but Trainor and Trehub have criticized the construction of the experiments that purportedly showed this.82 If this pattern can be confirmed, it would show that a perceptual advantage for interpreting one’s native music begins early. But this would not demonstrate that the challenge of learning to understand a foreign music is insurmountable.
As a matter of fact, experimental evidence seems to show just the opposite. Patel describes the emerging view as being “that the mental framework for sound perception is not a frozen thing in the mind, but is adaptive and is constantly tuning itself.”83 Huron, along with Paul von Hippel and David Harnish, offers some empirical evidence that statistical learning leads to improved performance in being able to predict the next tone in a foreign melody. Studying both Balinese and American subjects, who were presented with tones in Balinese scales and asked to bet on what the subsequent note would be, Huron and his colleagues found that Balinese subjects did considerably better than their American counterparts, which is unsurprising. However, American subjects became considerably more certain as to what the next note would be in a short time period. At about ten tones into the melody, the American subjects showed comparable confidence in guessing the next note as their Balinese counterparts.84 Huron concludes that this experiment shows that the American subjects were making rapid headway in orienting themselves to the Balinese music: “Either the American musicians were able to adapt quickly to the unfamiliar music, or they were able to successfully apply intuitions formed by their extensive experience with Western music—or both.”85
Even before very much exposure, the previously discussed fact that we experience music as animated can help guide our focus in alien music. We can ask ourselves, “How does it move?” In endeavoring to answer this question, we will tend to isolate particular streams in the music, distinguished perhaps by relative distance from each other in auditory space, or perhaps by distinctive timbres. We will also pay attention to whether or not there is a regular pulse, and whether a pattern of strong beats is recognizable.
Turino’s characterization of participatory music suggests that music in that category is designed to facilitate acquaintance with the music for those who are unfamiliar with it. Presumably the transition is easier for those who are accustomed to the general style than for those who are not, but no previous experience is presupposed. This would suggest that a culture’s participatory forms would be particularly inviting points of entry for foreigners to begin getting oriented in the culture’s music. The evaluative universals, in general, offer bases for beginning to enjoy music that is significantly foreign. Both transcultural universals—such as the preference for symmetry, balance, and clarity—and pancultural universals—such as the preference for displays of vitality—can direct what we attempt to hear in foreign music as well as offer bases for taking pleasure in it.
Cultural Familiarity
The upshot of this and the previous chapter is that there are characteristic ways of sounding human. Even though the “universals” are at most constraints, with the consequence that music is extremely diverse, the general profile of human music is sufficient to afford us a way into foreign music. Of course, nothing can replace experience as a means of deepening one’s understanding.
In efforts to understand music of types that are made in reidentifiable pieces, Davies emphasizes the importance of familiarity with the type of which it is an instance. For example, “because of differences between the conventions characterizing suites, symphonies, sonatas, concertos, and the like, hearing the work as the work it is involves hearing it in terms of conventions that apply to it as a symphony, as a concerto, or whatever.”86 While this principle is applicable to making acquaintance with musical forms in one’s own culture, it is also relevant to efforts to understand unfamiliar music from other societies. Greater acquaintance with the music of a culture can help one to pick out what is predictable in generic terms as well as what musical events are surprising.
Getting acquainted with another culture more generally is also important for gaining deeper understanding of its music. The tendency to conjoin musical patterns with extramusical contents is a common denominator of human musical experience. This tendency of music is often exploited in rituals and in other contexts, most obviously by means of the apparently universal tendency to conjoin some music with words.87 Harwood suggests that if there is anything that might be called a universal in such practices, it is music’s symbolic role.
Those theories of ritual which do suggest how music (and language) might play critical roles . . . stress the symbolic function: music occurs in ritual because it “signifies” other non-musical concepts involving human affect and communication.88
The symbolisms that cultures wed to music, however, are rarely transparent to outsiders. Thus the universality of musical symbolism is of mixed benefit for making sense of alien music.
One might simply fail to recognize a way that music is connected to other content within a foreign culture. Or one might learn something about content that the culture’s music is conjoined with and be alienated by the specifics. After hearing and greatly enjoying Rhoma Irama’s popular hit in 1980s Indonesia, “Sahabat” (“Friends”), I was moved to read the lyrics, provided by the CD insert. Then I was startled to discover that their theme was that one can only find true friends among those who share one’s religion, specifically, Islam.89 Music conjoined with messages that exclude one as an audience member may certainly interfere with cross-cultural musical enjoyment.
Alternatively, if the symbolic character of music is recognized, it can enrich our understanding of foreign music. Learning more about the culture that produced the music is likely to make the music more intelligible to a foreign listener. One might also discover musical associations with common human themes (such as longing or mourning) that one can relate to one’s own experience. Some symbolisms may be cross-culturally common, grounded in some of the universals considered above. The association of music with human animation, for example, might be elaborated into more specific symbols that can be understood by outsiders without much difficulty.
Music’s symbolic role is important for our purposes. It suggests an important interface between the universal and the culturally specific, since the content that music is taken to symbolize will presumably be culturally shaped, even if some aspects are more common. The idea of music as a symbol, however, also returns us to the theme with which we opened, the notion of music as a language. If music is symbolic, is it symbolic in anything like the way that language is? I will consider this question obliquely in the following chapter by reversing it: does language communicate like music does, or in some other way?